Swear words on Twitter

In daily life it is thought that between 0.5% and 0.7% of the words we use are swearwords, but the proportion on the site is roughly twice this, at 1.15%. According to this study, about one in every 13 tweets contains a swearword of some kind.

Intriguingly, swearing also seems to be an early-week thing. Tweets become more and more likely to contain a swearword as the day progresses, perhaps reflecting the accumulation of things we have to swear about, and peak profanity is reached between midnight and 1.30am, suggesting that people who are awake at that time are, let’s say, the least inhibited. Yet Friday, Saturday and Sunday are consistently the least sweary days of the week.

This should confirm that twitter addiction works like any other addiction, as a mechanism to relieve pain. People deal with the pain of their frustrating lives when they need it the most: mon to thu, evenings, etc…

It would be interesting to know if heavy cursers are also heavy users (the article doesn’t say).

+1 In addition to extrapolating across a population without controlling for the age of the twitterer, I would be interested in male v. female cursing, regional cursing, and tweets emanating from religious communities, as well as the content context in which the curse appears (more cursing on political subjects, for example).

In the excerpted paragraph they aren’t extrapolating. But they are comparing twitter with the normal population.

The obvious explanation for more swearing on twitter is that twitter users are disproportionately young adults, and young adults swear more than children and old people. I’m not sure this really is the explanation, but it’s the first thing you’d want to investigate. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with being 26?

I will add, having played tens (if not hundreds) of thousand of hours of poker online and in person, poker players online type vile messages far more frequently than the frequency of vile comments made in a live poker room. Humans are cowards. It is a lot easier to be a Paul Krugman asshole in the safety of your plush Princeton office than face to face with the person you are calling names*.

*I’d replace Krugman with Mankiw, but I am hard pressed to find references of Mankiw calling other people names.

Both Krugman and Mankiw can be assholes just of different breeds. I much prefer the Krugman type, Mankiw may not expicitly call people names but everything he writes is dripping of the condecense of some pompous Harvard professor looking down his nose at everyone.

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